Explosive growth in communication technologies over the past several years has lead to the advent of the “Internet of Things,” connecting devices as smart objects in the home, office, or other facilities. This growth has been fueled by better communications, hardware, larger networks, and more reliable protocols. As a result, communications service providers are now able to offer their customers unprecedented levels of access to information, resources, and communications.
To keep pace with these service enhancements, electronic devices (e.g., cellular phones, tablets, laptops, televisions, refrigerators, smart bulbs, etc.) have become more powerful and complex than ever. This complexity has created new opportunities for software conflicts, hardware faults, trial-ware, and other similar errors or phenomena to negatively impact a device's long-term and continued performance and power utilization levels, as well as the end user experience. As a result, identifying and correcting the conditions and/or device behaviors that may negatively impact each device's long term and continued performance and power utilization levels is beneficial to consumers.
Collection and aggregation of information about device conditions and behaviors by service providers and manufacturers may enable faster identification and correction of malicious behaviors and performance degrading conditions. Behavior information may be gathered for many types of “Internet of Things” devices and passed to service providers and manufacturers, who may analyze the data for long-term device behavior trends, errors, malfunctions, etc. In this manner, service providers and manufacturers may gain useful information about the operation and function of devices subject to diverse operational conditions. However, gathering such information has the potential to reveal sensitive personal information to service providers and manufacturers.